Synthetic Modeling of Cultural Language Evolution

Recently cultural theories of language evolution have gained significant momentum in explaining natural language. This paper reviews agent-based modeling, one of the key methodologies which is in part responsible for these developments. We discuss the most important challenges for a theory of cultural language evolution and the resulting dominant experimental paradigm. The discussion is framed along examples of experiments conducted within the methodology. We focus, in particular, on spatial language as an example of a complex and cognitively central domain treated in a series of robotic experiments.